$8 Is Basically $5 When It Comes To Buying Games, Peak Dev Says

How expensive can a game be while still feeling like you're only dropping five bucks on it? According to Peak co-creator Nick Kaman, $8 is the ideal price point for a $5 game.

In an interview with Game File, Nick Kaman explained that the team had a $5 "joke" that actually ended up informing Peak's standard pricing. "We had this joke of, like, how much is a game really?" he said. "In a player's mind, what does it mean to spend five bucks? Well, that’s five bucks. But six bucks? Well, that's still five bucks."

"Four bucks is also kind of five bucks. Three bucks is two bucks. And two bucks is basically free," Kaman continued. "So we've got these tiers: You know, twelve bucks... that's ten bucks. But thirteen bucks is fifteen bucks. And we found that eight bucks is still five bucks. It doesn't become ten bucks. Seven ninety nine, that’s five bucks, right? So, eight bucks going to five bucks is the biggest differential we could find in pricing, so we found it very optimal."

This "eight bucks is five bucks" joke originated in conversations between developers at Landfall and Aggro Crab, when developers from both studios were working together to create Peak. While Peak originally launched at a reduced price of $5, its standard price is $8, or more specifically $7.99, based on the pricing of Landfall's indie horror hit Content Warning.

Even though Kaman's whole joke is kind of confusing and hard to follow, psychological pricing is a very real science in the business world, and the strategy seems to have paid off for Peak. The offbeat co-operative climbing game was the third best-selling game on Steam over the holiday season, moving almost 800,000 copies in just two weeks.

Peak is currently on sale on Steam for $4.95--basically $5--which is the cheapest price the indie hit has sold for since it released in June.

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